Robert Pattinson’s (above) acting career gets cheated by the disappointing dud “Cosmopolis,” directed and written by David Cronenberg, and adapted from a Don DeLillo novel about a high-powered financial wizard’s crazy limousine ride around Manhattan.

‘Cosmopolis” is like the theater of the absurd — the kind that isn’t funny. It’s like atonal music, which the untrained ear might mistake for noise. It’s like action painting, a splattery mess. David Cronenberg meets Don DeLillo at last, and it’s as if all the angels of heaven have come together. And said nothing.

Cronenberg’s film of DeLillo’s novel is humid with strange portents. Gnomic utterances. The random and the jagged. The arch and the abstract. Eric Packer, a billionaire trader, has decided to get a haircut. So he decides to take a day to float across Manhattan in his yacht-size limo in a vortex of nightmarish traffic. (The president is visiting. Riots loom.)

Packer is played by Robert Pattinson. Part of the joke is that Pattinson is the last guy you would hire to play a major genius who, at age 4, calculated his weight on the various planets. Pattinson’s weak attempts to convey intellection render the overall effect that much stranger.

As Packer cruises in his massive automobile, various women and fellow financial wizards (played by, among others, Juliette Binoche, Jay Baruchel, Samantha Morton and Sarah Gadon) appear in the vehicle for sex and financial talk that sounds like the CNBC crawl as rewritten by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Feast your ears: “People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do.” “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did.” “People will disappear in streams of information. I know nothing about this.”

A doctor stops in to administer a daily checkup. Packer leans forward for a rectal exam while he keeps talking to one of his many conquests. He learns his prostate is asymmetrical. This ties into a similarly misshapen bet on the Chinese yuan, which is costing Packer hundreds of millions of dollars.

Packer can’t manage to work up any interest in the fact that an unseen nemesis wants to kill him, but he breaks down in tears when he finds out his favorite rapper is dead.

Paul Giamatti plays a sinister figure with a towel over his head named Benno Levin. These are the names of two men who succeeded Giamatti’s actual father as president of Yale. And yet — coincidence? — the character name was the same in the book.

Protesters hurl rats. They cry, “A specter is haunting the world.” Doom lurks. Convergence threatens to become catastrophe. Someone gets a pie in the face.

Huh?

There is no energy to “Cosmopolis.” There is nothing resembling humanity. There is not the slightest rumor of a whiff of a hint that DeLillo or Cronenberg knows anything about finance. The climax is as dull as reading the dictionary of a language you do not speak.